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(2)Commander Shepard vs (5)Tharja vs (20)Aeris Gainsborough 2013
Results Round 2 Sunday, August 18th, 2013 Ulti's Analysis For the most part the quote thing was only passively funny, but that picture is absolutely golden. Tharja staring at Aeris and warning her about death, in a match where Aeris got killed by the upset bug, is golden. This was the second match in a row where people couldn't wait to anti-vote the establishment, and this time around it was Final Fantasy 7 getting its ass kicked. Early on, Aeris was winning. Either she's more popular than Shepard by herself, or bracket voting put her ahead, or what. She stayed there for quite awhile, too, but never really built a lead or pulled away. While she was going up for the first couple hours of the poll, the biggest lead she managed was 137 votes. But in no time at all, Shepard began coming back with very little resistance. It only took him an hour and a half to get rid of Aeris's lead, and once he tied the poll he just took off. Usually when a favorite is losing a lead, there is a ton of resistance and a tie holds for awhile. When Aeris lost the lead, she just died. Shepard would end up laughing in the face of the so-called legendary FF7 day vote en route to a 700 vote win, and it was one of the coolest upsets of the entire contest. I love FF7 as a game, I really do, but Aeris is a bad character and is only notable because of the end of disc 1. Yeah she probably wins this match without Tharja in the way, and yeah FF7 anti-voting is running rampant in contests these days, but who can possibly complain when Commander Goddamn Shepard is the beneficiary of it? How many characters in this entire bracket are actually better characters than Shep? Maybe 5? This was a great win for Shepard and Mass Effect fans, and Shep has come a loooooooong way from getting 13% in a fourway poll in 2008. Zen's (Late) Analysis Alright seeing Shepard's quote makes me think we wrote those and not Bacon, that's great. "I should go" would also have been a good quote. Or "Wrex" and make Wrex's "Shepard." Shepard vs Aeris had some minor debate, people were pretty down on FF as a whole by this time so a lot more people on Board 8 were in Shepard's corner than usual. It also helps that Mass Effect is one of very few Western franchises we give a shit about cuz you can plow blue aliens. It's weird seeing Shepard, a dude who got destroyed by Pikachu and once lost to Sandbag and Magus, win pretty easily here. Aeris had put up a decent percentage on Auron in 2010. How did FF fall so far in such a short amount of time? Did that many people blindly anti-vote FF? How did people get the perception that Cloud and FF always win anyway? I've seen that all over the site. You see a match like Master Chief vs Yuna, go to the Halo 4 board, and everyone is posting threads like "WHY DOES FF ALWAYS WIN ON THIS SITE??" ignoring that Cloud only won a single contest that was basically rigged for him and Sephiroth won a Villains contest he was handed on a silver platter as an excuse to remove him. Yeah, FF does well, but Link and (some of) Nintendo have been dominating for years. Tharja looked alright here because of it. Cool to see her in Round 2. Who's the hot Fire Emblem character of the minute now? Anyone more familiar with the franchise want to rank all the FE characters' 2018 strength? Category:2013 Contest Matches